The OpenXprocess blog is primarily about software projects and how to improve them. As well as musings on agile processes, software engineering in general, and methods like Scrum and Kanban, there's advice here too for users of process planning, execution and improvement tools - and the metrics they can provide.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Project Patterns

Creating project patterns in xProcess requires you to think about what are the framework parts of youroverall process. The diagram above shows a project pattern for a variant of Feature-Driven Development (FDD) and it's interesting to see how much of the process has been modeled here and how much elsewhere.

If you read the books on FDD - for example the one by Steve Palmer and Mac Felsing is a good one - you'll see that FDD is classicly drawn as 5 stages: Build a Domain Model; Build a Features List; Plan by Feature; Design By Feature; Buld by Feature. You can see from our pattern diagram that 2 of these stages did not make it into the project pattern. Why is that? There's a simple explanation: the last 2 stages in this description are repeated for each and every feature. These 2 stages are modeled within the Feature pattern so that their activities occur each time a feature is instantiated.

You can also see the project pattern contains the first 2 Timeboxes of the project (subsequent ones will be instantiated from the Timebox pattern). This is also a useful idea: put the parts of the process that you know should happen at the start of every project within the project pattern.